


And then there were none

by CelestialIguana



Series: I thought we were meant to be better [2]
Category: Dreamcatcher (Korea Band)
Genre: Angst but also fluff, F/F, Historical Fantasy, I had to do it to em, I promise, also historical inaccuracies, dami is a cat hybrid, gahyeon is a badass vampire, im sorry, kind of dark sometimes, my research was for aesthetics only
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-05-12
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:54:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24049294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CelestialIguana/pseuds/CelestialIguana
Summary: Yoobin wasn't the same person she had been when she had met Gahyeon, all those years ago, amidst London's gaslit alleys. But perhaps neither was Gahyeon.New York wasn't the beginning, merely a continuation of a story spanning centuries of blood and fire, and Gahyeon's eyes still burn with the same light Yoobin remembered falling into in another lifetime.
Relationships: Lee Gahyeon/Lee Yoobin | Dami
Series: I thought we were meant to be better [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1734913
Comments: 6
Kudos: 28





	1. Before

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this rather than think of my other obligations, I'm sure that's understandable. It can be read without the main story I suppose, but you might be a little confused? If you're cool with that, continue. And enjoy :)
> 
> Title from the Dreamcatcher song of the same name.

Under the stars, Yoobin remembered.

It was easy to remember things during the night hours, she found. Easier to think on times long since passed into oblivion when the twinkling lights above were so obviously the same ones that glanced off her face all those years ago. Not Gahyeon’s face, though. Gahyeon had always seemed to absorb light like some sort of black hole or siren song. Nothing escaped her gravity. Sometimes, looking to the stars, Yoobin wondered whether that life had been a dream, or whether she had actually ever woken up. The sky, of course, utterly oblivious to the plights of insignificant earth bound creatures, resolutely ignored her. Yoobin couldn’t blame them.

(She also couldn’t keep personifying the stars as a way to avoid the one person who still ghosted through her thoughts, but who was going to stop her?)

And she would have kept questioning the stars and explaining away her passivity as patience had that ghost not taken a sledgehammer to her carefully constructed walls and blown into her cafe with all the force of a typhoon. 

Vampires were like that, Yoobin should understand by now. No consideration for subtlety, no concept of personal space. Probably a side effect of having to bite people to survive. 

_ I’ll come find you,  _ Gahyeon had said.  _ I promise.  _ It was not the first promise Yoobin had been given before. Gahyeon spoke in promises, breathed vows like oxygen. Yoobin had always been the more careful of the two. (Of the three, although the thought of him brought a bitter taste to her mouth. She was glad he was dead. She only wished she had been there to see it.)

The stars mocked her from their seats on high. Yoobin sneered in their general vicinity and closed her window to the sounds of the night, throwing herself much too aggressively across her couch.

It was unhelpful, the couch-throwing, and Yoobin remembered anyway, with or without the assistance of the oblivious stars. 

***

Yoobin had already killed three men before the vampires found her, still squeezing pinkish water from the fur of her tail. She had heard their approach, despite the alleged strength of vampire stealth (propagated more by vampires themselves, to support their Creature of the Night status), and was of the mind that the sight of a Bast washing blood from her fur would be enough to warn off any potential predators. She was irritated to discover it was not.

“Can I help you?”

The man, whose name Yoobin did not know at the time but would come to hate, spoke first, in a smooth voice that somehow managed to rub Yoobin’s fur the wrong way. “I was hoping you might be able to, actually.”

Yoobin turned around. With her glamour burned completely away, splatters of red across her nose and cheeks, she imagined the looked like a serial killer. Cosplaying a cat. 

“When I said can I help you,” Yoobin said slowly, around her extended canines, “I did not actually mean that I, in any way, offered my help. I meant, in fact, that you should leave me alone.”

“Don’t you want to hear our offer?” the man asked, smiling. Yoobin bristled. 

“I do not. I have heard enough of men’s  _ offers  _ for many lifetimes.” She jerked her head towards the shadowed alley, from which a strong scent of blood and residual fear wafted gently. “You can ask them what their offers were, if you like.”

The man looked a little taken aback, eyebrows furrowed. Satisfied with her last word, Yoobin turned on her heel and made to walk away, before a voice rang out from the shadows.

“Wait, please,” the voice said. And Yoobin suddenly wanted nothing more than to wait, to turn around and see the face that gave it such life, to do whatever this musical voice would have her do, and just as the eerie calm took her, a bird call spun through the air and the spell was cleaved in two.

The woman in the shadows cursed under her breath. “Fucking birds…”

Yoobin’s eyes narrowed into yellowed slits and her claws, still stained red, flicked from under her nails. “I will not have my mind unravelled like a ball of yarn,” she spit. “Leave, before I cut your tongue out and feed it to your friend.”

The man took a small step back, grabbing his partner’s arm. “Come, Gahyeon,” he muttered. “This one has gone feral.” Gahyeon shook her arm from his grasp and opened her mouth, but Yoobin interrupted, shaking with rage.

“Feral?” she hissed. “Is it feral to protect what is mine? Is it feral to defend myself from men who would take from me my  _ skin,  _ to wear as a sick trophy? Is it feral to object when someone I have only just met walks about in my mind like it is theirs?” Stalking into Gahyeon’s space, she glared up into the vampire’s dark eyes. “Tell me, vampire, is it  _ feral _ to ask for human decency?”

“We are not human,” Gahyeon whispered, and suddenly they were much too close, and the scent of her skin reignited the dormant blood rage burning through Yoobin’s veins. 

“Then could you be worse than them?” Yoobin countered, stepping back into safe territory. “Because I imagine you think yourself above your prey.”

The man coughs. “Of course. Their lives are dust to us. Mortal.”

“They, at least, do not presume to control my mind.”

“Only because they cannot,” Gahyeon said. “They would, if they had the power to do so."

Yoobin sighed. Her shoulder ached from her recent fight, she felt itchy and uncomfortable with dried blood, and she was much too tired to exchange words on human philosophy with a vampire too set in her ways to change. It was the new century, Charles I was King, and humans would always be humans just as vampires would be vampires. Such was life.

“May you find the help you need in someone else,” Yoobin said, and left the two vampires standing in the bloodstained alley of London beneath the unchanging stars. 

  
***  
  


They found her again, of course. Once vampires had a scent, they never lost it, even amidst the chaos and turmoil of noonday London. Yoobin was prepared, though, and had brought a small pistol, tucked into her undergarments. She did not intend to fight a vampire with her teeth and claws.

“I am still disinclined to hear your offer,” she said in greeting, positioning herself against the dusty stone wall of a pub with more patronage than was strictly proper at noon on a Sunday. But Yoobin was by all accounts a demonic cat, according to the Church, so let the men have their drinks, she decided.

The two vampires were dressed for a turn about the park, it seemed, although it was quite hot for Gahyeon’s sweeping dress, and the cobblestones a bit tricky to navigate in shoes with such high heels.

“Perhaps we could convince you?” The man extended a slim, gloved hand. “Han, very pleased to make your acquaintance.”

Yoobin looked at his hand until he put it back in the pocket of his waistcoat. “Dami,” she provided, because a Bast’s real name was sacred and not given lightly. “It would please me if you left.”

“It would be a shame.” Gahyeon’s voice sounded different under the light of the sun. Brighter. Less like it was worming its way into her mind and settling inside like a snake. “I would like to properly meet you. Might you consider joining us for a walk? The weather today is rather nice.”

Yoobin was not of the same mind regarding the weather. It was much too hot, and her hat rested heavily on her ears. But she was deathly curious about what these two vampires were up to that required her help specifically, and what was that phrase about cats and curiosity? 

“If you promise not to use your hypnosis on me,” Yoobin said, dragging herself laboriously from the cool shadows. “I will know if you do.”

(It had taken significant research, frankly, to build mental wards strong enough to keep out what was obviously a vampire of considerable age and skill, but Yoobin had little else to do with her time.)

Han looked pointedly at Gahyeon and nodded, eyes unreadable in the shadows of his broad-brimmed hat, and Gahyeon sighed. 

“I promise,” she said, and then grabbed Yoobin’s arm in a movement too fast for even Yoobin’s feline eyes to follow. “Come with me, Dami!” Yoobin couldn’t stifle the shocked cough of a laugh that escaped her lips.

It was only the first of many promises Gahyeon would make, and only one of the many that would be broken, but Yoobin did not know this at the time. How could she, when the vampire spoke with such confidence that she could have said the stars were gemstones woven into the black cloth of space and Yoobin would have believed it, if only for a second? A second wasn’t anything in the life of an immortal, but it would be enough, in the end. 

***

It was her tears they needed, Yoobin discovered, over the course of a very confusing conversation. They were working a spell that required strange ingredients, including vampire blood, Bast tears, a mermaid's scale given freely during a new moon, three grams of sanctified earth, and a stolen heart. They already had the vampire blood, of course, and Yoobin had been next on their list. Apparently she had not kept as low a profile as she had thought.

“Just a few tears,” Han had said, as if that wasn’t a weird thing to ask of anyone at all. “They can even be of happiness, if you like. And we would compensate you.”

“How much?”

“Name it,” Gahyeon said, lips much closer to her ear than Yoobin had though, and oh, but that sent shivers down Yoobin’s spine in a manner she hadn’t felt in a while. The vampire still held Yoobin’s elbow in the way ladies did as they walked about the London streets, but surely they weren’t all so terribly aware of the heat of their friend’s hands through their clothes. 

“I, uh, don’t know yet,” Yoobin managed to respond.

Han waved a hand through the air, looking very collected and at peace with the world and his place in it. He had an air of someone who knew he was the top of the food chain, and expected the food to step out of his way. (Most pedestrians did so, whether or not they realized they were doing it.)

“No matter, we will have time for business later.” He took Gahyeon’s other arm and smiled in that dark way of his. “Right now, we are taking a walk, and wondering how best to make a Bast cry.”

There was something in there that Yoobin passionately disliked, coming from Han’s lips, and apparently it showed in her eyes for Gahyeon dropped Han’s hand to pat her shoulder, a little awkwardly. 

“Sorry,” she muttered. “He is much older than I, and sometimes forgets modern conventions.”

“I feel this entire conversation forgets modern conventions,” Yoobin said. “You are presuming I agree to this strange request, which so far I have not.” 

“Of course, of course.” Han smoothed the lines from his jacket and reclaimed Gahyeon’s hand, for all the world like a gentleman about to take his afternoon tea and purchase a piece of the New World. “May we presume to ask you to dinner tonight?”

Yoobin should have said no, and taken her arm back from Gahyeon’s grasp and walked away. She should have been lost to the streets of London and its old, old magic, and she should have stayed in the old world where she had been raised, where she knew what to expect and where to run.

Regret is a bitter thing, Yoobin knew now. But perhaps the taste would have been just a bad had she said no.

Nothing for it now, of course. Yoobin said yes, and received the address on an embossed card, and attended that dinner, and her life was not her own until centuries later.

(It was not a bad life. But denial goes down easier than acceptance, and Yoobin wasn’t much fond of the taste of that, either.)

***

The stars had moved only slightly when Yoobin opened her eyes again. She had fallen asleep on her couch, with her arm tucked uncomfortably under her chest and her ears pressed against the arm of the couch. They would be sore later, surely, but Yoobin could not bring herself to care at the moment. 

Remembering was painful work, after all, and certainly overshadowed any slight grievances her trusty couch unknowingly caused her. 

They had her cry into a small glass beaker, she remembered. Those tears had glimmered in the gaslight of their large townhouse and she had thought that would be the end of that. 

He had asked her if she would rather cry of sadness or of happiness or of something else all together, and in his eyes she saw tears of pain and darkness and then she had turned to Gahyeon, whose eyes were another kind of dark, and offered yet another option, one of heat and skin and passion. Gahyeon had scared her more, at the time. 

She had taken neither of the two up on their individual offers, and had instead sat on a hard wooden chair and thought of the men she had clawed to shreds in that alley all those nights ago until the tears of anger and injustice came, and she bottled those up for the vampires and said her goodbyes, agreeing to return the next afternoon to discuss the promised payment.

(As she had left, Gahyeon had shaken her hand, and swept a knuckle across her still damp cheeks. It had burned like an iron brand, and settled deep in her stomach for the rest of the night. In that moment, all thoughts of monetary payment had been banished from her mind, and all she wanted was to see where these two creatures of the night next made port.)

Yoobin groaned in frustration and threw an arm across her face. She was so very tired of living a life of questions, of effect rather than causation. 

“Where are you,” she asked the ceiling of her flat dispassionately. It didn’t respond. “I was living my life,” she whispered. “I was doing fine, and then you walked in, you came back, and I wasn’t–“

She twisted her head to assess the stars peering through her window, mentally blaming them even though they could not have known. “I wasn’t ready.”

***

“Have you ever seen a mermaid before?” Gahyeon asked, hair windswept and salt-ridden but still managing to look purposeful. Yoobin couldn’t begin to imagine what kind of sea devil she herself must resemble. 

“I have never seen the sea.”

Gahyeon raised an eyebrow. It was a common reaction from her. Yoobin didn’t know what it meant, that she was becoming aware of the vampire’s many reactions, but it couldn’t be good.

“You have never seen the sea?”

Yoobin shook her head.

“Dami. You live on an island,” Gahyeon said flatly.

“Well,” Yoobin protested, “it is a very large island, to be sure.”

Gahyeon laughed, and that was what Yoobin remembered most about the trip to the sea to find a mermaid, for it was the first time she had heard the vampire laugh, and it was a loud, ringing sound that brought to mind the wind roaring between trees and the waves crashing against the rocky coast, and would forever after carry the salty scent of the ocean.

Han was kneeling at the edge of the pier, hair longer now, tied back against the wind, speaking quietly with someone in the water. 

This jetty was mostly abandoned, but there had been a few ships making emergency moorings as the winds picked up, and a fisherman clearly concerned for the two women standing alone on the dock was approaching from the south.

“Lady,” he called, in a heavy northern accent. “I expect it’ll rain soon, lady, you should get yourself somewhere warm.”

Gahyeon smiled sharply, and even Yoobin, who had now been traveling with them for a few weeks, felt a chill run through her blood. “Thank you, sir, but I’m afraid I have business here.”

The sailor opened his mouth to object, watched as the setting sun reflected off Gahyeon’s inhuman teeth, and let his common sense overpower his chivalry. He walked quickly back to his ship, where he would find warmth, alcohol, and a distinct lack of women with fangs. 

Yoobin laughed quietly, but the sound was lost to the sea and the wind.

They stood there together for a while, as the scale had to be given during the new moon and it was not yet nightfall. It had been a clear night, Yoobin remembered. The stars had been bright, and she had thought it to be a good omen.

Later, after the scale had been gotten and the mermaid had slipped away into the dark ocean (Yoobin wished she had spoken with him, for it had been a him, Han said, but bygones and all that, and he had let her hold onto the scale anyway) they had taken shelter from the oncoming storm in a quaint inn not too far from the small jetty. It had provided hearty food, acceptable beer (to Yoobin’s taste, not quite classy enough for Gahyeon, and Han just had water), and two rooms, of which Han had gentlemanly offered to take the smaller one and allowed the two women to share.

Yoobin never slept worse than she had that night– she imagined Gahyeon could hear her racing heartbeat from across the room, thought the vampire might even be listening to the rush of blood through her veins and to her cheeks, and hoped it was all put down to the warmth of the room.

There were two beds, of course, as was only proper. Yoobin couldn’t decide if it was a blessing or a curse, to be able to hear Gahyeon’s breathing and not feel her skin, or save herself from that worse torture of physical contact. 

When had it gotten this bad, she asked herself. When had she started aching to run her fingers over Gahyeon’s face like she had done to Yoobin’s tear stricken one that evening? It wasn’t right. Yoobin couldn’t be attached to someone who was so obviously morally corrupt, who saw humans as insects to be crushed, who looked at the world and saw it as something to consume.

Gahyeon wasn’t a nice person. She wasn’t even a good one. (A part of Yoobin thought she could have been, had she tried. But she wasn’t, was the thing.)

Yoobin still tried. And so she could not have Gahyeon, not with the way things stood now. Thus resolved, she let the last vestiges of her glamour slip away, curled into the bed, and went to sleep.

Some things change. And some don’t. Yoobin had always been too mutable, too easily twisted one way or another, like a river bending itself around a rock, until that rock becomes a mountain and suddenly there’s no way to fall but into a yawning chasm of uncertainty. 

How lucky she was, that Gahyeon had been there to catch her.

***

A very much unwelcome knock sounded at Yoobin’s door. At first she thought it might be the delivery man with her late night pizza (sardine and pepperoni, for those wondering), until she remembered that she had not actually gotten around to ordering her pizza, for the stars had tempted her away from the phone and she had long since lost that train of thought.

Now very irritated, because not only was there someone at her door, there was someone at her door who was not the pizza man, and she was decidedly not in the mood for visitors. Particularly those who did not come bearing pizza.

With a groan, Yoobin opened the door, and her heart promptly jumped into her throat.

“Dami–” Gahyeon began, eyes wide, before Yoobin shut the door and put her back against it, breathing carefully through her nose.

“Dami!” floated through the door, but Yoobin steadfastly ignored it and looked around for a potential escape route. The fire escape was under construction, but Yoobin could jump from her window ledge to her neighbor’s, and climb down from there, and she always landed on her feet anyway…

“Let me in, Dami, this is ridiculous,” Gahyeon called. “We need to talk.”

  
  
“ _We_ do not need to talk,” Yoobin hissed, sure Gahyeon could hear her clearly. “ _You_ need to talk. I do not _want_ to talk.”

“I think–”

“I do not care what you think, Gahyeon!” Yoobin snapped, shouting to her empty apartment. “I have cared what you thought for far too long, and I am over it.”

There was silence for a moment, and Yoobin wondered with bated breath if Gahyeon had perhaps left, but of course not. She had never given up easily.

“Then I will not talk,” came the response, after long seconds. “Not until you are ready. But please, let me come in so I can really see you.”

“You saw me at the cafe, did you not?”

A short laugh. “That was not really you, unless you have changed more than I thought possible.”

Yoobin closed her eyes. Here, finally, was something she could not avoid, for it was standing at her door and would not leave. 

She opened the door and faced the source of all her pain, all her joy, and met Gahyeon’s eyes. She had a new scar, dark against her cheek. In her eyes Yoobin saw another time, a city old with magic and blood, nights of gaslit conversations and sea salt laughter.

“I have changed,” Yoobin said. “I know you do not think it possible, but I have.”

Gahyeon smiled, and for the first time in years, it was not edged like a razor. It was something soft, something those lips were unused to, but it looked rather fitting somehow.

“Would you deny me that same capability, Yoobin?”


	2. After

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: This chapter deals with our main character experiencing something very near to human trafficking. If you wish to avoid it, skip the section beginning with "It had just been a walk" and resume at the next set of asterisks. 

“What do you intend this spell to do?” Yoobin lay splayed out on the spring grass of the small hill she and Gahyeon occupied with much leisurely pleasure, and watched as Han went inside the derelict stone church to inquire whether a real priest had been around to sanctify it in recent years. “I know of no purpose for a spell that requires such strange ingredients. A stolen heart, you say?”

Gahyeon turned her head to look sideways at Yoobin, eyes squinting into the sun. “It is meant to grant the user a kind of foresight, Han said. He wishes to know the future.”

Yoobin laughed, and the sound scattered into the vast blue of the sky. “What a mortal aim.”

“Why do you say that?” Gahyeon sounded genuinely confused. Yoobin thought she looked very attractive once the ice melted from her eyes. “Mortals could never create a spell such as this.”

“Well, no,” Yoobin conceded. She twirled a lock of Gahyeon’s dark hair between her fingers, amusing mostly for the fact that the notoriously thorny vampire let her. “But it is such a human want, is it not, to wish to know the future? To foretell it?” Gahyeon said nothing. “What use do we have for knowing the future when we are almost guaranteed to live it, and experience it for ourselves, new and unspoiled? Is it not better to never know what approaches? Little joy would remain in an immortal life, I think, if you knew all that it would bring.”

Gahyeon remained silent for a moment, pondering. “I think,” she began, “that the point is to know it, and thus be able to change it.”

Of course. Of course Han would believe himself the author of fate.

“You think it is mutable, then? You believe you can change the future, that your decisions are not already set?”

“If anyone can, it will be us,” Gahyeon murmured, voice almost lost amongst the rustling grass. “To know the future, to know everything, would make us prophets to the humans. We would be more than their nightmares, we would be their gods.”

Yoobin fell silent and took her fingers from Gahyeon’s hair. 

“I don’t think I agree with those sentiments,” she said quietly.

Gahyeon turned her eyes back to the sky. “You don’t have to. We aren’t keeping you here, Dami. You can leave whenever you wish.”

“Can I?” Yoobin asked, and Gahyeon frowned and assured her that of course she could leave, she had never been a prisoner, but Yoobin hadn’t really meant the question for her anyway. The clouds floated across the clear sky, Han returned with a small pouch of what he promised was recently sanctified dirt, and her question remained unanswered.

That is, until five days later, when they tried to steal a heart from the grave of a recently deceased young lord of the nearby manor, and Yoobin’s world burned to the ground.

***

“Would you deny me that same capability, Yoobin?” Gahyeon asked now, in the present, in her too small apartment rented with a barista’s salary and money deposited into an old London bank a century ago, withdrawn in the guise of her own great-granddaughter. 

The question hit harder for Gahyeon’s use of her true name, but the implications reverberated throughout her entire being. For Gahyeon was saying that she had changed, that she was not the same person she had been all those years ago, in the alleyway and on the beach and on the hill. Yoobin had thought she had seen something strange, something different, back in the cafe, but it had been lost in the tsunami of emotions crashing about her ears at the time. Here, standing in front of her, the little things were clearer.

Perhaps Gahyeon was different. Perhaps something had changed, and maybe it had something to do with killing Han and maybe something to do with the vampire and the fairy she had gone with and maybe it had always been destined to happen. Maybe it had just been time that was needed.

It didn’t matter the means, really, when the end was the same.

“I could not,” Yoobin said, after much too long a pause. “I would not. If you actually have changed, I would like to hear of it.”

A ghost of a grin flitted across Gahyeon’s lips. “Do I have permission to speak now?”

Yoobin grimaced. “If you do so truthfully. I know your tells, I have spent long enough watching you lie.”

Perhaps that was too mean, but Gahyeon took it in stride, grin never leaving her face. “Where should I begin?” she mused, more to the couch than Yoobin. 

“Where we left off,” Yoobin suggested. And that was as good a place as any.

***

The night was overcast and cold, for autumn had given way to the bitter chill of winter, and Yoobin was part feline so still warm-blooded, but she felt the biting cold deep in her bones and had not thought to pack the proper clothes for such weather. Fortunately, Gahyeon seemed to have clothes for every situation, and was very pleased to loan her a well-made cloak of some soft, dark material that carried Gahyeon’s scent all too well.

It was the cloak that saved Yoobin’s life. Monster traffickers, as that distasteful sort liked to call themselves, had heard of a Bast in the area. They were of the mind to capture it, skin it, and sell its ears, tail, claws, and eyes to the highest bidder on the European mainland, where the black market functioned unregulated. They had been watching the trio for days now, planning, but, never close enough to see their faces, presumed Yoobin to be the vampire rather than the Bast.

It had just been a walk, Yoobin remembered. She had been at ease for the past months, traveling the English countryside with the two vampires, roaming wild through the uninhabited forests and hunting when she wished, where she wished. It was a mistake.

They captured her with the air of men who were used to preying on the unsuspecting, and two of them paid for that in limbs and lives. But there were too many, and she was more focused on keeping the glamour hiding her feline traits than keeping them from binding her hands, and with her last clear thought, she hoped that Gahyeon might have been close enough to hear her shouts, or at least smell her fallen blood.

They thought her a vampire, of course, a blessing and a curse. They brought her blood once a day and watched her drink it, doing her best to hide her revulsion, and inspected her teeth with much confusion. She was kept in darkness, but she could see rather better than they could, and could make out every inch of the hatred and disgust they carried in their eyes. The blood was not the worst part.

Yoobin was there three days before Gahyeon found her, Han in tow, but the screams of the damned stayed with her ever after, ringing through her ears savagely. Yoobin, if asked later, would pinpoint that night as the moment something shifted in her chest, some shadow lifted from her gaze and she saw all of humanity in a very different light. For it was one thing to hold a few men accountable for crimes against her, but it was very different to watch, helpless, as tens of others suffered around her.

Yoobin would not forget them, although she did not know their names or their faces. And she did not forgive.

When Gahyeon entered her small cell with blood streaked across her hands and cheeks, eyes alight with a deadly fire, and Han grinning that smooth smile of his with far too many teeth, Yoobin was not the same person they had said good-evening to that night. There were no humans left alive in that ring.

***

Days later, when Yoobin had eaten properly and cut her hair and finally, blessedly, dropped the glamour hiding her ears and tail and eyes, she sat with Gahyeon in their shared room in that townhouse in London. 

“I see what you mean,” she said quietly. “About humanity.”

“You do?” Slender fingers curled around Yoobin’s wrist.

Yoobin hummed in response. “They do not accept us for what we are, and all my life I have tried to hide for them. Be something different for them, so that they might sleep more comfortably at night.” She wrapped her own fingers around Gahyeon’s hand, and suddenly the two were holding hands and Yoobin felt a childlike happiness rise in her chest and heart. 

“I am not human,” Yoobin said, louder. “I do not wish to pretend as one. I am what I am, and you are such as you are, and they will love us or fear us or worship us and I do not _care.”_

Gahyeon dropped her hands and clasped her face instead, dark eyes burning with something Yoobin had once been afraid to succumb to but now fell into gladly, welcoming the fire with open arms.

“You would not forsake me, would you, Gahyeon?” Yoobin whispered, breath mingled with hers.

Gahyeon inhaled sharply. She wet her lips, which forced Yoobin to drop her gaze from those eyes to her mouth, and all kinds of thoughts of burning skin and roaming hands flitted through her mind for a few heated seconds before Gahyeon responded. 

And as the night caught fire and everything Yoobin had been melted to ashes and dust, Gahyeon spoke her last vow. “I would never,” she said. “I promise.”

***

“You remember how it was, before you left?” Gahyeon began, the question in her eyes melting into the reflections of New York’s lights. “How the three of us utterly destroyed England’s black market?”

Yoobin couldn’t stop the dark pleasure that the memories brought with them, and she was sure Gahyeon caught a hint of those shadows. “I remember.”

“How we brought hundreds of men to their knees for what they had done to our kind, and yours, and all the others? How Han single handedly dismembered eighteen of them and sent each of the lords funding the whole sick business a little message? How you set fire to a market place and locked the doors, and we could hear the screams from a block away–”

Yoobin coughed and tried to blink the superimposed images away, but they were memories, and of course it didn’t work. “Yes, Gahyeon, I remember. I could never forget.”

“I should hope not,” Gahyeon said. “We were glorious then.”

“Mmm.” Yoobin glanced pointedly at the clock. “If you are trying to convince me of some change, you are quickly failing.” The longer she spoke with Gahyeon, the more she found herself slipping back into old habits of speech, the overly formal language of a different time coming easily to her tongue.

Gahyeon’s stony facade crumbled a little and she scrambled for words. “I mean, we are still glorious now, of course, just in a much more– pedestrian manner, less… creature of the night…” She looked at the room’s decor with obvious judgement. “More along the lines of _I bought a record player just for show–”_

“Do you miss it? Because you sound as if you do.”

It was a double edged question; Gahyeon could very well ask if Yoobin missed it, to which Yoobin would have no proper response that would not label her a massive hypocrite. (It was hard, terribly hard, not to miss the absolute freedom of those nights, even if they were misted with guilt and blood.)

Gahyeon did not ask. Rather, she cocked her head and thoughtfully gazed at the vase Yoobin kept on her coffee table, meant especially for instances in which one wanted to gaze thoughtfully at something.

“No,” she said finally. “I do not miss it. But I also do not regret it. I believe we did something good then, and I would never regret the lives saved, or the ones taken.”

Yoobin could not disagree, but nor could she completely agree. (There had been innocents, sometimes. Caught in the crossfire. Casualties in a war not meant for them but dead regardless of reason. Yoobin could not remember their faces, although she had promised she would try. Perhaps she and Gahyeon had not been so different after all.)

“When we parted–”

“You mean, when you left–”

“–when we left _each other,”_ Yoobin conceded, “I needed space, time, to come to terms with how many lives I had taken. I asked you to leave Han to his own devices and come with me, instead. Do you remember what you told me?”

Gahyeon worried her bottom lip with her teeth, a habit Yoobin had never noticed before. Perhaps it was a new one.

In one ragged breath, Gahyeon let the stream of words fall from her tongue like an offering, a sacrifice. “I told you I would rather bring about the future than mourn the past but Yoobin, I don’t believe that anymore. I live in the present now, and I would so much rather that present be with you. Things have changed. I have seen change, I _am_ changed. I promise–”

“Don’t.” Yoobin cut her off mid breath. The word burned. “I don’t want any more promises. You once promised not to use your hypnosis on me, and you did, that night, you asked me not to leave and I almost complied, before I realized it was your magic in my ear and not your true heart.”

Gahyeon’s naturally pale face seemed to pale even more in Yoobin’s dim apartment. She did not deserve fluorescent lights and supposed-to-be-cream-colored couches; Gahyeon was meant for, had been made for the wild. She belonged to the wind and the darkness and yet here she was, giving herself to Yoobin. Yoobin was not the wind nor the darkness nor was she freedom, that precious thing the both of them had always chased. 

But maybe there was something to be found in binding yourself to another. 

Gahyeon’s soft voice shattered Yoobin’s thoughts. “For that I can never apologize enough, although I had hoped Han’s death might win me some sympathy.”

“His death gains him forgiveness for what he did to us, how he encouraged us down that dark path.” Yoobin paused, considering. “Did he do the spell, in the end? Did he learn the future?”

“No.” Gahyeon shook her head. “The last ingredient proved the most contrary– we stole many hearts, from graves and from places of which I am less proud, but they never worked. And after a while, we ran out of your tears and our mermaid friend began complaining of bald spots, so Han backed off.” A tiny smile slipped over her lips. “I suspect he would have been very unhappy if he had discovered what came of him.”

Yoobin scoffed. “You two never understood the spell, then. You could have done it all along.”

“What are you talking about? Han said the words correctly every time, and it never worked. No visions. Nothing.”

“Of course not. He was not the one who had stolen my heart.”

Gahyeon froze, in the way only vampires could manage. Yoobin was convinced she stopped breathing for a minute, stopped blinking. And really, she should have known, or at least suspected, after all those years.

“Did it never cross your mind that the heart the recipe called for was not a physical one, Gahyeon?”

Gahyeon cracked her mouth open, and then shut it again. Yoobin smiled softly.

“Or did you simply not know what you had gained?”

Finally, with a sound like a rusted hinge, Gahyeon spoke. “I never presumed– I never thought you might have actually– loved. Me, that is.”

“I would not have stayed so long had I not.”

Gahyeon grasped for words. “No, you misunderstand. I knew you loved the freedom we offered, I could see it in your eyes when we hunted together and roamed the cities. It was palpable. And I knew you enjoyed the thing we shared, the nights we had. But I never thought it was because you loved me.”

Yoobin just nodded. The night had only ever held her dreams; Gahyeon had claimed her heart, irretrievably. 

“If you had,” Gahyeon whispered, “why did you leave?”

“Because Han’s freedom came with rivers of blood, and I was done with that.” She glanced at Gahyeon’s hands, slender fingers that had taken so many lives (yet saved many more). “I still am done with that.”

“Yes. Yes, I can see that now,” Gahyeon murmured. “I believe I might be, too.”

For a small eternity, the room was silent, as long years passed over the two immortals like water. It was a little like meeting a new person, as neither was the same as they had been when they had first met in that London alley.

“I have some interesting friends you might like to meet,” Gahyeon spoke into the new silence. “They are very wise, for their few years. Catalysts, of a sort.”

Yoobin raised an eyebrow, pleased, for once, to be the one to do so. “Would these friends happen to include that vampire-Fae duo that came so unpleasantly into my cafe the other day?”

Gahyeon laughed, and with it soared memories of the sea and glittering scales in the deep and a hint of salt on Yoobin’s lips, and when she leaned forward and pressed her lips to Gahyeon’s still laughing mouth, part of her imagined she could taste it still.

“We are changed,” Gahyeon breathed against Yoobin's lips. “But I don’t think it is for the worse.”

There had been a time, long ago, when Yoobin would have burned the world and all its people to ashes for just this kind of quiet harmony. There had been a time when she would have kissed Gahyeon in the light of those flames, and the shadows would have looked beautiful dancing across her skin and shattering off her fangs. Now Yoobin found that the world could not penetrate the thin walls of her apartment. The sounds of the city could not reach them here, among the stars. Here, at last, was her future, resplendent.

A fire grew within her chest as Yoobin wrapped her arms around Gahyeon's neck, hands tangled into her dark hair so deeply she thought she might never get free, nor did she wish to. “For the better,” she said. “I promise.”


End file.
